Samuel Colt: America's Own Industrial Revolution

1311 Words6 Pages

Samuel Colt was a genius American firearms inventor, manufacturer, and entrepreneur who popularized the revolver. His inventions introduced the new era of the arms race and greatly changed the way military actions were executed. His contributions in the arms industry paved the way for the expansion of America's influence across the world and launched America's own Industrial Revolution. This abstract examines Colt's manufacturing process that allowed him the use of interchangeable parts that ultimately, culminated with the invention of the repeating revolver. His succession of revolutionary weapons, including the repeating revolver constitutes the legacy that he has left to the United States. Using the peer-reviewed and published sources, as …show more content…

His inborn curiosity and ingenuity brought to his attention the mechanism by which the ship's wheel could alternately spin or be locked in a fixed position through the use of a clutch. During his trip at sea, he modeled his first six-barrel cylinder arm out of wood that according to history.com website "featured multiple rotating barrels, in later versions. Colt would opt instead for a rotating cylinder containing multiple bullet chambers to reduce the gun’s weight and bulk"("Samuel Colt”, n.d.). Upon his return from the sea expedition, he showed his father the wooden model of the revolver that ultimately, his parent approved the funds for. The two prototypes failed because of their poor quality and this is when Samuel Colt decided to earn money by touring the USA and Canada as a public demonstrator of the laughing gas and finance …show more content…

Patent No. 138 for his revolving-cylinder pistol. The biggest advantage of his innovation consisted in the ability to fire six shots without reloading- while the single-shot firearm required 20 seconds to reload, a crucial time for frontiersmen and soldiers fighting hostile Indians who could send six arrows at defenders in the time it took them to load.
Meanwhile, Colt created also important inventions in the American history unrelated to the firearms industry such as the first remote-controlled Naval mine explosive and underwater telegraph line used in sending telegraph messages between America and Europe, that later became Morse's telegraph.
How did the U.S. expansionism and the situation in the political arena spark a need for Colt's